Underground cartoonists included post-office workers producing transgressive urban hellscapes

Evidence

Wilson, largely known through Crumb’s Zap Comix, was the most shocking of cartoonists, specializing in all-over, impacted scenes of mayhem, dismemberment, and grotesque sex acts. There was also EVO neophyte Joe Schenkman, a native New Yorker who worked at the post office and, boldly naming himself “Yossarian” after the anti-hero of Catch-22, produced several impossibly busy one-page urban hellscapes including a vision of deliquescing tenements that could have provided a cover image for Sol Yurick’s novel The Bag. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1474

Categorization

• XREF: The post-office-worker-cartoonist detail is exactly the sort of modest-material-condition fact the reader is hunting — cultural producers of the scene were ordinary wage workers, not career artists.